A World to Win

The failure of two key international summits, on the climate crisis and trade, in December 2005 will add to the growing popular momentum for change in the coming year that has to take us beyond the status quo of globalised capitalism.

Despite all the evidence showing the urgency of the ecological crisis engulfing the planet, a gathering of countries in Montreal in the first half of December was unable to agree a plan of action. A vague agreement was signed which called on governments to talk about further carbon emission reduction targets. India, China and the United States made no commitments whatsoever.

Later in December, the World Trade Organisation met in Hong Kong under pressure from developing countries to make concessions. While South Korean farmers battled police in the streets, the fat cats inside decided that the interests of the major corporations had to come first. No agreements were reached, leaving Oxfam to comment:

“The WTO Hong Kong ministerial meeting was a lost opportunity to make trade fairer for poor people around the world. Rich countries put their commercial interests before those of developing countries. Small progress in agriculture was more than cancelled out by backward steps in other areas. Most of the difficult decisions were put off to a further meeting in early 2006.”

In the summer hundreds of thousands had marched and joined protests organised around Make Poverty History while the G8 leaders met in Scotland. But as 2005 drew to a close, Dave Timms, from the World Development Movement, made this sobering assessment: “There was some progress on debt but we have yet to see any of these pledges translated into a penny for the poorer countries and there was no progress on trade.”

So 2005 was the year that the ruling elites and major corporations dashed the hopes of millions around the world who want action to halt climate change before it’s too late and allow one half of the world living in dire poverty to share in the progress made by the other half. Led by the British and American governments, the corporations have shown themselves immune to pressure and protest.

The Blair government is determined to push ahead with “reforms” which mean working until 69 before you get a pension, seeing the break-up of state education and more privatisation in key areas like health that it doesn’t give a fig for popularity. It is on a mission to make Britain PLC a safe place to invest in. There is an increasing prospect that New Labour could even give way to the Tories, a party that once seemed dead and buried, such is the extent of the growing reaction to the Blair regime.

We must draw the lessons of 2005 if we are to make progress in the coming year. The first is that pressure and protest, however well organised and militant, will make little impact on the course adopted by the major powers. Governments and corporations are locked into an embrace based on the bottom line. They are not interested in “fair trade” or curbing carbon emissions if production or profit is affected. Only their shareholders matter.

Secondly, it is clear that the Bush and Blair regimes are rejected by increasing numbers of their own citizens. Their turn to authoritarian rule only intensifies this opposition and creates divisions within the existing political system. Many judges, lawyers and even civil servants reject the sweeping powers assumed by London and Washington in the name of a spurious “war on terror”.

Bush and Blair, along with the other reactionary regimes that enforce corporate-driven globalisation, rule not through some innate strength or support, or by conspiracy. They cannot solve a single major issue facing humanity, whether it be retirement, healthcare, poverty, climate change, or the challenge posed by terror attacks.

No, their power is actually a negative one. It resides in the absence of viable political and economic alternatives that could attract the mass of the people to support them in an active way.

Montreal and Hong Kong confirmed that there is no way forward through existing power structures and regimes. A World to Win is determined to use 2006 to develop strategies and proposals that offer democratic political and economic alternatives. We will aim to convince as many people as possible that the future lies in their own hands, achieved through a transfer of power from the minority to the majority through mass action. AWTW will continue to argue that not only is another world possible but that another world is absolutely necessary.

31 December 2005